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Friday, January 29, 2016

Flint Water Crisis Masterpost

The whole Flint, Michigan water crisis is an absolute clusterfuck of racism and class warfare and horrible. I've been wanting to write on it but literally every other day some new bit of information comes out about it that makes it so much worse. So, masterpost time.

CNN has a decent overview of the history of the problem. First, two years ago, during a financial state of emergency, the state government decided to switch the water supply for the city of Flint from Lake Huron to the Flint River to save money. From the beginning, Flint residents were alarmed because of its notoriously dirty appearance.

It was supposed to be temporary, but soon after the switch, the tap water started looking and smelling funny. The water was literally brown.

Then, one kid out of her pair of twin sons began falling behind his brother in weight and developed a bad rash after being bathed in the tap water. He was diagnosed with lead poisoning.

She called a Virginia Tech professor and expert on water quality. He paid out of his own pocket to assemble a team and travel to Flint to test the water. He found "lead levels he had not seen in 25 years."

After that, people began to take notice and more tests were done. The Michigan state government continued to insist that everything was fine and that their own tests which conveniently found no problems were somehow more accurate.

Even as all this happened, the state government continued to largely ignore and deny the problem. It took Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha to make them, and the rest of the nation, to pay attention. Dr. Mona (as she prefers to be called) heads the pediatric residents program at Flint's Hurley Medical Center. This gave her access to a ton of data about the blood-lead levels in the city's children. Her and her staff dedicated themselves to getting the information and checking and re-checking the numbers. Among mounting public panic and suspicion over the fucked up water and illnesses, she eventually went around the bureaucracy and went public with her alarming findings. The state government shat on her for it, but the numbers couldn't be denied.

The city of Flint is no longer being supplied by the Flint river. The government switched the supply back to Lake Huron. However, the corrosive nature of the Flint river water means that the lead in their pipes is still exposed and, as a result, there is still lead in the water. This is why bottled water drives are still necessary and the people of Flint are still largely fucked.